Alva Review-Courier -

GOULD, Colo. (AP) — Stunned by unprecedented megafires, Colorado is embracing logging — mowing holes up to 140 acres in beetle-infested lodgepole pines — in an effort to revive out-of-balance forests.

This for-profit mechanized tree-cutting, concentrated between the blackened Cameron Peak and East Troublesome burn scars, has been clearing 3,000 acres a year.

And state foresters propose to clear more.

At two cutting sites west of Fort Collins recently, hulking red and yellow tractors equipped with whirling hot saws sliced through 12-inch trunks of the towering pines, then as they thumped to the...